Search Headlines & Links: July 7, 2006

Below, a recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along
with other items we’ve spotted but not blogged separately:

From The SEW Blog…

Conference Coverage: SES Latino 2006
The first ever Search Engine Strategies Latino will be taking place this
Monday and Tuesday in Miami, Florida. Danny will be moderating some sessions
and I will be covering the Landscape & Tactics tracks at the Search Engine
Roundtable. Nacho Hernandez from iHispanic is hosting the event. You can view
the conference schedule by clicking here. Want to discuss? Join our Search
Engine Watch Forums thread….

Google
Health Scrapbook: Google’s Health Portal
Via PaidContent and VC Ratings, Google is working on a health portal named the
Google Health Scrapbook. From what I understand there will be a "directory"
for patients, doctors, vendors and pharmaceutical each. Google "users will be
able to log in with their own account information and do things such as add a
new medical provider, check their medical records or pay their bills." Google
has been rumored to be working on a health portal for a while. With the hire
of Adam Bosworth, Google’s Architect, Google Health we expected more. But when
Google released Google Co-Op, those rumors were…

Google
Checkout Could Increase Costs For The Shopping Comparison Engines
Google Checkout adoption will translate to higher costs for the shopping
comparison engines. Some of the costs will be passed onto merchants, and I?m
not sure they?ll stand for it. The shopping comparison engines are some of the
biggest purchasers of pay per click (PPC) listings on Google Adwords and
Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM). Companies like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and
NexTag are also some of the savviest search marketers in the biz, looking at
revenue derived from each and every click. Whether you call it arbitrage or
not, many of the shopping comparison engines purchase keywords to drive
traffic to their…

W3C
Selling PageRank Or Thanking Supporters?
Nathan Weinberg linked to a post by Emad Fanous who notes that the W3C is
selling PageRank 9 and PR7 links. You can buy a link on this page also and
earn yourself a PR9 link from the w3.org site. How much is it? $1,000 per year
and if you do that, you will also get yourself a free PR7 link on this page.
How about that for a good deal? :) I’ll stop being sarcastic now… Things to
note: (1) The links do not carry the nofollow attribute (2) It seems like
anyone can buy the links. See the…

AOL
Podcast Search Beta Live
TVEyes’ podcast search engine Podscope.com has been launched as a service on
AOL Search in Beta. You can access the AOL Podcast Beta Search after accepting
the license agreement, you will then be directed to http://podcast.search.aol.com/.
A search will provide a method to listen to podcast excerpts with a link to
hear the whole podcast. You can submit your podcast to AOL here. You can also
learn more about AOL Podcast Search beta here….

Business.com Adds NoFollow To Many Links
Threadwatch reports that Business.com has added the nofollow attribute, a
method of telling search engines not to count particular links as a "vote," to
many of its outbound links. Aaron Wall discusses how the use of the nofollow
in this sense "muddies their credibility," by saying, we have links on our web
site that we posted but we don’t trust them. It turns out that only those that
pay business.com for a directory listing gets a link without the nofollow
added to it. Everyone else who is accepted into the directory, is tagged as
untrusted….

Lawsuits
Over The Google Party Jet; Arguments Over Bed Sizes On Board
New details out now about the Google Jet we’ve written about before, the used
767 that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have purchased. Turns
out, there are lawsuits filed over the retrofit of the plane, and with them,
news of hammocks hanging from the ceiling and an apparent fight between the
cofounders over bed sizes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt had to referee….

Dr.
Stephen Hawking Turns To Yahoo Answers For How Humans Will Survive
Wow. Dr. Stephen Hawking, yes, the real Stephen Hawking, has turned to Yahoo
Answers for help. How can the human race survive the next hundred years?, he
asks, in a question that Yahoo reassures us is really from the famous
physicist and not a joke. And stay tuned, because Yahoo’s planning to get U2’s
Bono to post later today. How’s it going for Hawking? There were 15,867
answers when I looked. That means his next question should be, "How can I
review all these answers?" The answer is to sit back and let the Yahoo Answers
community itself do it….

Smarter.com Updates Site
Smarter.com made 4 major changes to its website. The company introduced a new
design, new ranking methodology, clustering beta, and limited crawling. While
Smarter is one of the little guys in the shopping comparison engine industry (Shopping.com
and Shopzilla being the leaders according to comScore data), these are bold
moves which show how serious the company is about becoming a major player….

Search
Engine Optimization in an Hour a Day
If you’re just getting started with search marketing, it can be tough to know
where to start or which sources of information to trust. Things change
quickly, and what worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. Fortunately,
there are some fundamental approaches and techniques that always seem to work,
and a new book does a great job of laying a foundation for search engine
success. Even better, the book avoids jargon and stays away from the countless
hotly debated "tactics" that often cause more harm than good. I’ve got a
review of this new book in today’s SearchDay article, A Beginner’s…

Google
In Another Dictionary: Merriam-Webster
The LA Times reports that the term ‘Google’ has been added to the
Merriam-Webster, the dictionary I grew up on. The other day we reported that
Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, the most authoritative
dictionary of the English language….

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.